“... own to dismiss as prejudiced, Utopian, sentimental and counter-productive every suggestion he may venture to make about what ought to be done. For this, the most effective technique – perhaps the only technique which can even hope to be effective – is to make such people ask themselves how they would react if they had to live the lives that the poor ...”

“... Europe and extends imperfectly into France and northern Italy. We are also describing an era which may be ending. Certainly full employment is no more. And Keynesianism is out of fashion. At the same time, there is in most countries, not merely in Britain, a more specific ‘crisis of the Welfare State’. This ‘crisis’ – the quotation-marks are to ...”

“... traditional leadership undermined and educated people wiped out or driven into exile, there may not be the wherewithal to establish representative government of any kind. This is not the case in the Sudan. There are all too many people waiting to form a government. President Nimeiri’s 16 years in power were characterised more by political confusion ...”

“... that it has no hope of reforming society, there is no useful point in the enterprise. Results it may well have, but bad ones. The trouble most Britons experience is not in telling a masculine ‘he’ from a generic ‘he’ but in telling ‘he’ from ‘him’ (‘He said it was to be kept between he and I’). Rapped by pedants and yet subjected to ...”

“... horse-dealers or lumberjacks. The conversational tone as she writes ‘home’ to Denmark may make it easier for the unconverted to understand why Out of Africa is accepted as her greatest achievement. Devotees of Karen Blixen have often sought between the lines of her African books and found nothing personal enough to satisfy their curiosity: a sense ...”

“... were traded in for some fireside modesty. ‘In the years to come,’ he said once, ‘people may decide that we went about things in the worst possible way, that we got it all wrong. We’ll just have to see.’ But with Walesa there was always the likelihood of a flip retort, a quick get-out for a man who had spent his life trying to avoid the ...”

“... mine. Music is truly the sound of our time, since it is how we most deeply recognise the home we may not have: the loss is trust and you could reverse that without change. The shared finiteness of language, structuring the infinite and unique particulars of experience into identifying patterns, inevitably falsifies. Elsewhere Prynne writes of ‘cosmetic ...”

“... then necessarily the continuing internal conflict, can be seen as interconnected. Such a theory may now be in sight. Its basis is the progressive unification of economics and ecology. It is not industrial production as such which has led to these major contradictions. That is the weakest side of the ecology movement, which has correctly identified current ...”

“... theatrical London, literary London, commercial London and, finally, maritime London.’ One may be puzzled at this description and one might have wished that the good Doctor had been more precise in his definitions and delineations. Is it possible to note so exactly these different areas of London? No such doubts exist for Mr Lottman. There is an area ...”

“... a Lark cigarette from this Tiffany box. Here. I’ll light it for you with my Dunhill.’ ‘May I have this dance, Lady Darlene? I am the Earl of Grant ford.’ ‘Indeed you may, Earl, honey. I am Lady Darlene.’ There are even touches of Gracie (or is it Woody?) Allen:   ‘Was your father weak, passive, absent ...”

“... other major French writer of that century or this; even Zola, stodgy, paunchy bourgeois though he may have been, at least pitchforked himself into the Dreyfus Affair. But Stendhal never really brought off anything – except, of course, the novels. We watch him drifting and coasting along, dependent on high-placed, energetic patrons like the aforementioned ...”

“... Liverpool has always been a special case in British politics. At first glance the pattern may appear much the same as anywhere else: Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative, with Labour intruding towards the end. The names may be the same: their significance was widely different ...”

“... say he were a simple man, but none of us can say that any more.’ There are, as these passages may have made apparent, two voices muttering in the shadows behind Kennaway’s prose, and they are the Old Firm of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. You can hear Hemingway grumbling in the rhythm of the faux-naif opening; it could be Colonel Cantwell muttering to ...”

“... and the book is so short, that the English reader is likely to be confused at a first reading, and may in the end – for all the notes provided – have still only a summary sense of them. All in all, The Meeting at Telgte is oddly summary, coming from a writer famous for his exuberance. Exuberance is present in the book, but as an idea rather than as actual ...”

“... of verse goes to the making of such a poem as ‘What is terrible’, so that his earlier work may be said to be bearing fruit, but what gives the poem life is that he has broken through the derivative verbiage which was apt to swill too freely round the more superficial layers of his mind and grasps helplessly for a bit of reality: Life at last I know is ...”